John Semley argues that highbrow horror cinema has won respectability but sold the genre’s soul. Case in point: Longlegs, which stormed through theaters this summer on the heels of a wildly successful viral marketing campaign:
Horror cinema has always relied on such promotional gimmickry to lure audiences. Hitchcock famously stipulated that no audiences be admitted to Psycho after the film began, lest its first-act twist be spoiled. Consummate carnival barker William Castle issued $1,000 life insurance policies (backed by Lloyds of London) with tickets to his 1958 fright-fast Macabre in the event that audience-members be scared to death. The casts of Cannibal Holocaust and Blair Witch disappeared for months to juice rumors that they had actually been murdered. The difference between then and now is not just the advertising but the results. The gulf between Longlegs’s carefully keyed marketing publicity and the film’s actual merit is so wide that Grandpa Munster could gun his souped-up Dragula hot rod through it without scratching the paint.
Yet its anticlimactic disappointment—in its very badness—Longlegs is revealing. More than another boring, letdown of a movie, it signals the exhaustion of a trend in cinema that has long worn out its welcome. It is a nail in the coffin of so-called elevated horror.
It’s a term deployed uneasily and almost always in quotation marks. “Elevated horror”: part marketing idiom, part abused critical byword. It’s a slippery, contested, obnoxious term that can be tricky to define. To paraphrase another notorious non-definition, you know it when you see it. Even if “elevated horror” (or “prestige horror,” or “post-horror,” or, god forbid, “hipster horror”) is essentially a made-up term, it describes a real thing. Over the past decade-or-so, a cycle of films has emerged that share common thematic and visual preoccupations. They also share something harder to dissect and easier to sniff out: an attitude.
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